At times during the opening session and a half of this bravura Test match on Saturday there was a sense around Lord's of two entirely separate occasions taking place. Out in the middle this was a day of outright and almost undiluted Yorkshire-ism for England, as Joe Root and Tim Bresnan extended their partnership to 99 soberly gathered runs, before Root reached a high-class and increasingly forthright century after tea, finishing on 178 not out.

For the opening hour of the day pretty much nothing happened, but it happened rather pointedly, an assertion of kitchen-sink values after the giddiness of Friday, as England scored 37 runs without loss on a pitch that seemed suddenly rather docile and obedient. Beyond this, around that gilded Victorian periphery, something rather different was taking place.

For Lord's and its patrons this was instead an occasion of almost overwhelming plenitude. More than just the usual annual staging post in the London summer season, the current Lord's Test has already been touted as the most lucrative in English cricketing history. This year, alongside its eye-popping gate receipts, Lord's can offer the newly expanded "corporate village", a triumph of catering that will feature a more or less endless lunch in train over five days, with more than 250,000 pints of lager served and 7,500 bottles of champagne popped by a swigging, strolling, scoffing, cuff-linked crew that thronged the walkways throughout the day, at times apparently oblivious to the triumph of even-keeled, right-handed Yorkshire-ism taking place beyond the clatter of cutlery and the chink of glasses being raised.

In the middle, Bresnan kept Root company throughout the first half of the day. He is an unusual batsman, an almost recklessly orthodox player, remarkable for his almost total absence of flair, and a heartening presence in England's occasionally collapsible late middle order. Refusing to be confined to the boisterous, big-hitting, all-rounder stereotype, Bresnan is instead a small-hitting all-rounder: not a biffer, not quite a blocker, but instead a Brezzer, and a wholly stickable presence during the 137 balls it took him to reach 38, before he spooned James Pattinson to midwicket.

Throughout which, Lord's own summer pageant, a kind of anti-Yorkshire-ism of lush and conspicuous consumption, continued to rage. Lord's has always felt to the visitor like a minor urban miracle, a low-slung green oval camped out like a secret garden in London's greying sprawl. It is, though, a place increasingly under siege from its own commercial ambitions, the furring of its arteries with an ever-greater density of ice cream hydrants, souvenir kiosks, gambling dens and tented champagne speak easys. The nursery ground picnic area (bottle of champagne: £240) was transformed throughout the afternoon into a kind of panama-hatted Raft of the Medusa by a feverish throng of the sozzled, the semi-sozzled and the smugly hampered (Jamie Oliver Match Day Hampers: £150).

Really, though, it is around the champagne gardens by the pavilion end that the opulence of a Lord's Test match Saturday is on show, a place where trousers are red, blazers are blue and I'm sorry sir, you're not coming in without a tie, bow-tie or cravat. It is of course all too easy to feel alienated by this vision of half-remembered imperial stuffiness. This week, the esteemed Australian journalist Malcolm Conn referred slightly despairingly to the "arrogance" of the Lord's pavilion crowd, although it is perhaps more a case of fevered social excitement as much as snobbery (the only thing worse than a toff is a toff who's desperate to show you he's a toff). On the other hand, even the rich, even the posh – even the English – need their summer rituals, and there is still a seductive high-end shabby chic charm about a Test match Saturday here, even as you stroll past the Lord's shop (replica urn: £50) and the display model £80,000 F-Type Jaguar with its cluster of well-heeled punters perusing, with apparently genuine interest, the vital statistics of its five-litre V8 engine.

And this is of course a distinctly southern cricketing bloom, buoyed by City wealth and London's unslakeable thirst for corporate hospitality. In May, Durham announced that they would be opting out of two international fixtures because, frankly, they can't afford to take the risk of making a loss. Meanwhile, in London on Friday night there were 20,000 post-work punters at The Oval for a domestic Twenty20 match, along with the usual full house just across town at Lord's.

And, as the sun began to filter through and the austerity batting of the morning to loosen a little, there was, if only grudgingly, a sense of richness to the cricket too. Root's 50 had come up off 122 balls half an hour before lunch, crowned by a delightfully balletic back foot force past point, bisecting two carefully set fielders. By three o'clock, England were still scoring at less than two runs an over and not so much grinding Australia into the dust as watching them crumble away by a process of natural erosion.

Still Root continued serenely, playing late and with a certain gymnastic severity off the back foot. There was a tangible acceleration once he'd reached his hundred, and even some invention as he scooped Ashton Agar fine for four before flaying him through the covers. Shortly after five o'clock, Ian Bell pushed England's lead up to 500 with a reverse sweep, drawing from the Lord's crowd the day's most purringly replete post-prandial cheer, as for the first time England's late-afternoon gorging on a flat-looking bowling attack seemed to chime a little with the Grande Bouffe of the Lord's periphery. If this was a day of triumph for Root and for Yorkshire too, with Jonny Bairstow seeing out proceedings, it was also an occasion of grand – and distinctly southern – opulence on English cricket's very own society Saturday.